Losing My Shit

Today I lost my cell phone. Actually I lost it two days ago but hadn't noticed because we were up north visiting family and they live in a beautiful spot and like most peaceful quiet places there is not even a glimmer of hope of service within several miles of their house. So I didn't notice that it was missing until we were driving home today and I traced my movements back to the last place I had used it and it was the bathroom of the Chevron we had visited the day before. I had called my sister to tell her we were running late for our rendez-vous because we had to stop for gas, and I have a vague memory of setting it down on a toilet paper holder so that I could wipe a juvenile bottom.

It's gone. Called the Chevron and they had not seen it so someone must have swiped it. It was a nice phone. Not something I really needed actually and I thought today about replacing it with just a simple cheap phone.

But it also got me thinking about all the losing of things I have been doing. Just a few months ago, again driving down from up north, I lost my wedding ring. And before that I lost my engagement ring, presumably when we were robbed and I lost my computer too. It is all very personal stuff. The computer and the cell phone holding all kinds of personal information (and images of my daughters) and the rings obviously holding a lot of personal symbolic meaning. All replaceable, but none easily or without a major investment of money and time.

I bought a new computer, a much nicer model than the predecessor, but the fingers seem not to need replacement rings. Not yet anyway. I love my husband and the wedding rings need to be rethought, perhaps updated to the more advanced married people we have become. I need a phone but not something fancy when all I use it for is calling and keeping appointments. Perhaps I should think of myself as a snake, shedding a crisp outer sheath that was cramping my style.

It's interesting. Now I have to tell everyone and ask them to email me their numbers since I never write down or memorize numbers anymore. We used to do that.

cruising

As we drove north on the I-5 the other day I was watching people zoom by in their cars. Sometimes they would almost be floating next to me, each in their own private universe, unaware of my gaze and of our parallel speeds and trajectories. I saw people everywhere, buzzing along in their little worlds when we are all actually going somewhere together. Our seemingly separate movements and choices constantly affecting everyone around us, sometimes only inches from colliding.

I had been giving myself a hard time for a number of days, and as I watched the woman in the black car floating along next to our silver one, something told me it was time to give myself a break. Time to get into the habit of giving myself (and therefore the people I love...okay, my husband) a break too. I criticized him a few times that day. Granted we were locked in a car together for eight hours with our kids, but still, as I listened to the way I was correcting him or judging his actions I saw that when I just pause for a moment to love myself, then I can just love him too. I can immediately release any need for him to be other than who he is.

I was starting to see something as we barreled up the 5, about my ideas around failure. And success. There was this gnawing feeling that had been following me around that I was on the wrong path, that I had made some mistakes and bad choices, and that I should be trying to do something smarter than what I am doing right now. That being a healer is a joke. That I will never make a living that way. Never be able to support myself creatively. These thoughts had been following me around for the past couple of weeks. Weeks in which I kept noticing or running into friends who I consider “successful” female artists and I kept seeing myself as some kind of failure. Or at least of limited potential. But as the woman in the next car floated by she gave me something rich. A sense of peace I had been missing and I asked myself: What is really standing between you and believing you are a “success”?

It's so simple. All anyone who has enjoyed success has ever had to begin with was a simple uncompromising belief in what they were doing. I might have thought for a while that I'd been up against a lot in terms of my demons, but I really have no excuse anymore. I see my gifts and what to do with them more clearly than I ever have. And to cultivate that belief into something unwavering and constant I have only to make a subtle shift in my habitual thinking. I need only to catch myself every damn time and shift lanes to that trajectory of confidence. The one that finds me every morning. The one that is flying 80 miles an hour through the blighted San Joaquin Valley singing Beetles songs. The one with five lists on each desk of projects I am working on. I don’t need to drive down that dead end that I know so well. And when I find myself there, it is not that hard to notice I have gone the wrong way and turn around. Get up that ramp to the freeway again.

Feeling Full

Today is turkey day and I am in a land of wild turkeys, spending a couple of days with my husband's family...well my family too! I love it up here. They live in a beautiful spot in a beautiful part of this beautiful state of California. My three year old and I took a walk this morning and I breathed in the moist air, so different from the air down where we live in Pasadena. Here it is moist and full of the smell of giant trees that surround the house. Very tall pines and lots of oaks and layers of fern beneath that and mosses of every color under that. We walked and stopped and looked under rocks and found grubs and other tiny creatures and then we walked some more and looked out over the grand vista from up on this beautiful hill and there we saw a hawk just landing on an electric pole and two deer standing along the side of the road eating grass. We had earlier communed with the bull that lives here and some lamas that also share the property so we had all these interactions with four legged creatures wild and domestic. To my daughter there is no difference. She is entrances by all life no matter the size of it. She was as happy feeding the bull as she was touching a slug. We didn't see turkeys today but they were on my mind because it is Thanksgiving and because I have seen them here many times before.

Turkeys represent gratitude and I was feeling very thankful as I carried her back to the house, even while my arms ached from her weight. She is too heavy for me to carry very long but she was tired and I was really enjoying it. I was thanking God for the moment and for being able to still carry her in my arms. It was just a beautiful day, the sun was warming my cheeks, her body was soft and wiggly, her face fully happy. We had seen so much on our little walk. We had dug under some velvety leaves to feel the moist earth and smell its rich fragrance. We had picked flowers. We had met a dog. And there we were again, stopping at the side to get some weeds for Ferdinand the bull and the way the tall grass was bending over the little stream and the emerald green moss was a perfect little art installation. This is one of my favorite places because it is so stunning and I am very grateful to be here this day. The greatest artist is making installations all around me and she is a lot of fun to watch.

Doctor's Visit

I never did meditate today but I had a moment of truth, actually two, worth noting.

The first was while I was in a doctor’s office with Grace, listening to an ENT (ear, nose and throat specialist) talk about her physicality. I was looking at Grace and a question I had written the night before, in connection with a project I am working on, popped into my head: Do you feel you are changing your lineage? Grace has inherited many physical traits from my side of the family and we were in that office to discuss her tonsils, which are, to borrow from the doctor’s polite phrasing, “quite generous.”

The reason we were seeing this ENT was because her dentist, her pediatrician and a speech therapist had all recommended we have her tonsils looked at. All were concerned because of their size and because last spring I told them all that she snored, slept with her mouth open, had circles under her eyes and seemed a little low on energy. She also had a tooth that wouldn’t let go, even though the adult replacement had already come in. It was sticking out like a shark’s tooth, at a 90 degree angle.

But over the summer that tooth fell out. It finally let go all on its own and all the other issues seemed to be resolving themselves one by one. The snoring stopped, she stopped breathing through her mouth, the circles had dissipated and her energy was good. As the doctor spoke, assessing Grace as the picture of health, I looked at her wondering if she was simply growing out of things, or if any of those shifts might have something to do with me, and all my changes.

The summer was the beginning of a period of deep healing for me, and ever since I have enjoyed excellent health and so has the entire family. (Okay, I was sick for a couple of days in early fall, but it was nothing more than a cold.) As I have become more and more disciplined with my spiritual practice I have never felt better physically. My kids seem healthier too and are getting along with each other better. In fact we are all getting along beautifully. We laugh a lot more than we used to. I was thinking about how my own personal healing was healing the whole family, particularly Grace, who is a lot like me. And as I looked at her sitting there, beautiful and radiant, I was looking beyond her, seeing my sister who had to have her tonsils removed at age twelve and was always suffering from colds and hay fever. I thought about my mother, my grandmother, aunts and cousins, all long gone but many of whom were creative women who put family first and never got around to really expressing themselves. Grace comes from a long line of women who were artists and teachers, full of life but not belief in themselves, and many of whom died fairly young.

On the way home we stopped for gas. As it was pumping and Grace was sitting inside the car I felt full of love. I was thinking about the lineage and the idea or the image of changing it. I let my heart open and started to look at everything around me with love. The other people filling their tanks, the oil stained cement, even the smell became beautiful. The scene at the gas station is normally a place that I don’t think of anything except getting through it. But as I stood there, fully in the moment, loving everything around me, a pigeon walked right in front of me. It was completely white. A beautiful white dove, just like the bird that flew back to Noah with a piece of green in its beak. A symbol of peace, and love.

My Desk

My desk my desk my desk

Oh how it plagues my mind

I wish it was a place to write, to think, to create but alas

It is piled high with bills, paid and unpaid and question-marked.

I take a ton of paper

Received daily in the mailbox

And knowing not how to wrangle it

Dispose of it there.

There there there on my desk

My poor creaky IKEA desk

How it sags in its imperfect joints under the weight

Of all that needs doing.

Does it scream and yell and beg for attention like those short people I live with?

No,

It sits quietly

Waiting for me to notice.

It watches how I do the dishes

Sweep sweep sweep the floors

Obsessively pulling shit from cat boxes

Yet ignore its dusty and disheveled surface.

It watches while I do most anything

writing, drawing, designing up a storm

Planning meals and cooking them into black clouds

Staring at anything but the to do lists, the filing and the God knows what is really in those high rising piles.

It marvels at all the ways I use up energy to swirl in a hurricane of activity

And waits…waits….waits...for me

To notice something is stuck

Nothing is actually moving.

That all that flurry of goings on

Is plugged up in the drain hole

Unable to flow out and down and through to where it needs to go

Because the bottom is clogged with the hairy mess on my desk.

Finally finally FINALLY it hits

That the desk can also be-- must be part of the creative tempest

Has to be loved into organized files and concrete action plans

In order for any rainbows to land.

making beds

I have been preparing two beds for planting this week. I made a small one for flowers that is right up against the wall of my studio. It is just a long narrow rectangle of dirt that had accumulated gardening tools and an old hose and a fish tank we didn't have any place for. I kept looking at the spot and thinking it would be nice to have flowers growing there. So yesterday I moved the junk, including some bricks that I had neatly laid last year and started digging. The dirt was dry as sand and uniform in texture and color. I dug down a ways and then started adding amendments. Some food, some worm casings and a whole lot of compost. Then I added water in a slow steady stream to make it hospitable for the seeds. I let it sit for a day and when I went back to it I was pleased to see how good it looked. The dirt was dark and moist and had a lot of varied texture to it. I felt it with my hands and dug in to test how far the moisture went down. I made holes with my fingers and dropped in the beautiful Calendula seeds I had. They have a curled crescent shape and a little stair step down the outside edge that reminds me of ferns and other things prehistoric. I placed a couple in each little hole and then covered them up, putting them to bed, tucking them in just as I would my own children. Then I opened a seed packet of Snapdragons and broadcast those along the back of the bed. I whispered sweetly to them all before spraying them with a fine mist.

Today I took the girls out to the garden to plant vegetables. We lifted the fabric cover off the other bed that I have been working on. The soil was gorgeous. This bed is a raised rectangle that has a lot of intention built into it already. It has been resting for many months after I turned a vigorous cover crop under to compost last spring. I had covered it with Avocado leaves as mulch, and just recently removed them. Underneath was moist fragrant dirt. I dug my hands in and felt satisfaction wriggle through every cell of my body. The scent of earth, rich and moist rose up my nose and said, I am ready! I evened out the slight hills that had formed from wind and small animals over time and I added a little more dirt and compost.

Before digging holes for the seeds, I had the girls sprinkle a little plant food over the surface. We mixed it in and then we used our six hands to smooth out the surface again. It smelled so good and felt so nice that we all fell into a trance and could have probably kept on smoothing all afternoon. Then we had fun poking holes and dropping the seeds in, marveling at their different shapes and the tiny patterns that some of larger ones had. Cilantro seeds, it turns out, look like little beach balls with stripes.

Preparing beds for planting is in some ways more satisfying than planting the seeds. The planning, the working of the soil, and finally smoothing it out is as fun to me as setting up a drawing or thinking about a story. It is setting a stage. And describing it this way makes me picture a body lying down. Mine perhaps. Then working on it. Setting it up for optimal growth and an abundant harvest.